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Rotherham: the silencing of Muslim voices

Amrit Wilson challenges the dominant narratives about Rotherham and child sexual exploitation – and asks who is really responsible for the way the far right have been able to exploit the issue.

Image: Police & far right protestors in Rotherham a month after the publication of the Jay report. Credit: Lynne Cameron/PA Images, all rights reserved.

Rotherham is a town whose very name has become synonymous
with the horrific cases of Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) which have occurred
there in recent years. The media narrative around these cases - appalling crimes
committed by a tiny minority of the population - is so powerful that it has
been extremely difficult to challenge or even question. However as Islamophobia
escalates to an unprecedented level with Boris
Johnson's comments emboldening the far right and racists and poisonous
tropes of Muslims as terrorists and sexual predators sweep the country, it becomes
particularly important to do so.

Once a thriving town built round coal mines and steel,
Rotherham today is a bleak place. The coal mines are closed and the steel
industry is in decline. Unemployment is high. However, as many people
emphasise, until six or seven years ago, racial violence had never been an
issue. The comparatively small Pakistani community had lived cheek by jowl with
white people. As playwright Emteaz Hussain puts it, “we were a working class
community struggling to make ends meet, everyone lived in close proximity, and
we naturally found a way of getting on.”

In 2011, The Times published a series of articles by Andrew
Norfolk, which brought the first reports of the child sexual exploitation
scandal in Rotherham. They led to the setting up of a House of Commons Home Affairs
Committee in late 2012 and eventually an independent
investigation by Professor Alexis Jay, commissioned by Rotherham Council,
into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham and Rochdale. The report
published in August 2014 concluded that between 1997 and 2013, at least
1400 children had been subjected to serious sexual exploitation, predominantly
by men of Pakistani origin.

Abrar Javid, a project manager with the NHS who lives in
Rotherham, remembers those days: “When the Jay report came out in 2014 it hit
us like a bombshell. The scale of the abuse as well as the way it was presented
by the media, the racialisation of perpetrators as Pakistani men and victims as
white girls….These horrific crimes had been committed by criminals but suddenly
we were all being targeted – being told there was something intrinsically wrong
with us and our culture – blamed almost as though we were harbouring these men…
the community was in shock.”

Casting
blame on a community

The Jay report
noted that the South Yorkshire police
had “regard[ed] many child victims with contempt and fail[ed] to act on their
abuse as a crime”. As for the Council workers, when questioned as to why they had not acted even where a
number of these children were in local authority care or known to the child
protection agencies, several of them had ascribed their reluctance to their
nervousness about being thought racist.

Jay reported this at face value despite the fact that
council staff routinely had to work with and enforce policies which many see as
deeply racist – the hostile
environment policy for example.

The Jay report was followed by two further reports. The
first, led
by Louise Casey, found Rotherham Council “not fit for purpose and …failing
in its duties to protect vulnerable children and young people from harm”. However,
it unequivocally blamed the “Pakistani Heritage Community”, declaring in the second
sentence of its foreword that “Children were sexually exploited by men who
came largely from the Pakistani Heritage Community. Not enough was done to
acknowledge this…”. Casey’s report claimed also that this “suppression of these
uncomfortable issues…has prevented discussion and effective action and...
perversely, has allowed the far right to try and exploit the situation. However,
in actual fact by far the biggest (in terms of police expenditure) far right
demo took place a month after the Jay
report and in response to the widespread publicity it generated, on
13th September 2014. Between 2012 and 2017, protests by far
right groups such as the EDL and Britain First, in South Yorkshire, have cost
£4m.

The second and most recent report was an independent review into South Yorkshire
police's handling of CSE in the summer of 2015 by Professor John Drew, commissioned
by South Yorkshire Police and Police Commissioner. It revealed that in the
period January 2014-2016, 67.5% of perpetrators of child sexual exploitation in
Yorkshire were of White/European origin and 19.1% of Asian origin. These
figures make one wonder whether in all the accusations which have been flying
around, the girls (and boys) who have been abused are being betrayed once again,
with that hefty 67.5% of perpetrators being simply ignored? Drew himself
commented in the report, “'the view that child sexual exploitation was
about red light areas, and was about gangs of men principally of Pakistani
heritage, led not only the force but also probably the whole partnership to
look for signs of exploitation in the wrong places. One superintendent, describing
the exploitation challenge today in his area, characterised the local problem
of revolving around ‘white European males, in their mid-40s, making extensive
use of the internet for initial grooming…’”

The Drew survey, however, was swept under the carpet. It was the Jay
and Casey reports which have continued to make the headlines.

“The
Jay report was the 9/11 of Rotherham”

As Abrar Javid puts it, “The Jay report was the 9/11 of
Rotherham. After it came out there was a deafening silence from both the
Council and the police. That silence was filled by the far right. They set the
narrative. They came into Rotherham with the slogan ‘Justice for the 1400’”.

This slogan was a demand projected through racist tropes of
Muslim men raping and abusing ‘our’ girls, so the demand for justice became a
demand for vengeance.

In fact, many in the Pakistani community were also seeking
justice for the girls. In August 2014, Muhbeen Hussain from the organisation
British Muslim Youth led a rally demanding justice for the 1400 and calling for
resignations and prosecutions. "We
are not here to deny anything” he said on that occasion. “The report
clearly shows a large number of those individuals were Pakistani Muslim men.
But we don't support the sentiment that it is a Pakistani or a Muslim problem. It
is clear what these individuals did but they are not part of our community -
the only community they are a part of is the criminal community... there is
nowhere in the Islamic faith that supports these actions.”

The marches by the EDL and Britain First continued. There
were 14 in as many months. The police refused to stop any of the demonstrations
from entering the town centre despite being urged to do so by Muslim
organisations and spokespeople. No charges of violent disorder were brought
against people on these marches despite attacks on the Mosques and Muslim businesses,
as Muhbeen Hussain sets
out in this article for the Independent. The presence of the far-right clearly
resulted in the radicalising of white youth in Rotherham. The number of hate
crimes escalated with Muslim women being specifically targeted. “Muslim women
were spat at! Abused!” says Zlakha Ahmed of Apna Haq, an organisation which
supports Black and Minority Ethnic women and girls facing violence. “Children
were bullied at school. The police said they could do nothing. They said Muslim
women should just stay at home - they refused to protect us!”

Moral
panic, abuse and silencing

As for Asian girls, as Zlakha points out, “they had been mentioned
in the reports as victims of grooming - and we know this to be the case from
our own work in Apna Haq - but they have been totally ignored”. In fact,
Islamophobia and the polarisation it has led to has inevitably silenced discussion
of the systemic gender violence which exists in the Pakistani community as in
all other communities.

Islamophobic violence on the pretext of justice for white
girls has been the order of the day and the far right has been so emboldened
that even Nazir Afzal, the Chief Crown Prosecutor whose
work led to the jailing of nine members of a Rochdale sex grooming gang in 2012,
was subjected to a campaign of threats and intimidation with thousands
of emails calling for him to be sacked and deported, an
EDL demonstration outside his home and Nick Griffin door-stepping him outside
his office . Afzal finally had to ask for police protection.

The backdrop to far right activity, as Shakoor Adalat from
the Rotherham Muslim Community Forum says, was the moral panic which gripped
institutions affecting not only the police but social services, profoundly
affecting the whole Pakistani community. For many this was reminiscent of the
1980s when, as Liz Fekete (Director of the Institute of Race Relations) writes,
“the
media and the fascists were creating the spectre of the ‘black mugger’” and
the Metropolitan police added to the moral panic by isolating "assault or
threat of violence upon a person, especially with intent to rob" from all
other forms of street crime and then providing the ethnicity of the
perpetrators. Today, as Fekete notes, the Ministry of Justice figures on
convictions of sex offences as a whole (8 per cent of which were committed by
Asians) have been broken down to isolate and emphasise the specific offence of
‘on-street grooming’ of which they made up a far higher percentage of
perpetrators.

The murder
of Muhsin Ahmed

Despite the insidious Islamophobia of so many of Rotherham's
institutions and the violent attacks, bomb threats and demonstrations of the
far right, there was no major Muslim protest till the summer of 2015. Then, on
10 August that year, Muhsin Ahmed, an 81 year old man on his way to the Mosque for
morning prayers, was brutally
attacked. He died eleven days later – three years ago this week.

Within days of Ahmed’s death Britain First were allowed to
hold another demonstration in Rotherham. “At that point”, says Abrar Javid, “we
felt that if we didn’t come out it would break the backbone of the community. Muhbeen
Hussain got in touch with the police and told them we were coming out in
solidarity. The police told him they would show ‘zero tolerance – take what you
want from that’. We did come out - the Rotherham Council of Mosques came out in
peace in a joint demonstration by the Pakistani and Yemeni communities and
white anti-fascists.”

The fascists were allowed to go right through the town
centre. Then, “when the police channelled the anti-fascist march down a road
that had a pub on it frequented by far-right protesters, a clash between
the two groups occurred after racist abuse was hurled”, Muhbeen
Hussain wrote in the Independent. There was fury about how the police
handled the situation. “The police were very heavy handed with the Muslim youth”,
says Javid, “kettling them… It was as though the police were out to penalise
the Muslim community - that is how it felt.’

Twelve Asian men, including Abrar Javid, were arrested and
charged with violent disorder. The Rotherham 12, as they came to be known (in
an echo of the historic Bradford
12 who had fought for the right to self defences back in 1981), were (like
the Bradford 12) all eventually acquitted by an all white jury in a massive
indictment of the South Yorkshire police. As one
of the defendants put it later, “there are similarities with what the
police did to the Orgreave miners, and how they herded them to a particular
spot … I had a bin thrown at me, punches thrown at me and I had literally done
nothing. Now you imagine five weeks later, at six or seven in the morning,
police officers, ten of them, coming to your house. Your children are scared,
you’re scared, you’re treated as some common criminal.”

Seven
of the far-right marchers were arrested and five were eventually given
custodial sentences for racially aggravated violent disorder. Perhaps it was
this, says Shakoor Adalat, that led to a rapid decrease in far-right marches
since then.

Things
started to quieten down. As Emteaz Hussein puts it, “the kids were playing with
each other but we were not left in peace. There is always external interference.”

Then,
in August 2017, an attack came from Sarah Champion, Rotherham’s own MP. It was
all the more shocking because, unlike the right-wing Labour Council, Champion
had won the trust of the Pakistani community. Champion chose to write an
article in the Sun newspaper on 10 August 2017, on the anniversary of the
attack on Muhsin Ahmed. Entitled British
Pakistani men ARE raping and exploiting white girls… and it’s time we faced up
to it, the piece “called out” Pakistani
men for sexually grooming and raping “white pubescent girls”.

So what brought Champion’s change of heart? In
Champion's own words, it was because “For too long we have ignored
the race of these abusers ... These people are predators and the common denominator
is their ethnic heritage”. One may well wonder why, given her concern for
women's rights, did she choose to write
in a paper well-known for its misogyny? Or, as Shakoor Adalat asks, “Was she
worried about those so-called ‘disenfranchised labour voters’? Or was it just
pressure from the local right-wing Labour party?”

The hurt and betrayal felt by many in the Pakistani community was so
great that they approached JUST Yorkshire, a secular human rights and equality organisation,
to collate people's feelings so they could let their MP
know the impact of her article. JUST Yorkshire published its survey, entitled Temperature Check - understanding and assessing the impact of Rotherham MP,
Sarah Champion’s comments in the Sun Newspaper on 10 August 2017, in March 2018, and duly sent
a copy under embargo to Champion. The report asked for an apology from her and for a “grass-roots
led inquiry... a Citizen’s Jury that will
critically analyse the impact of the CSE scandal on Race Relations and the
civil liberties of people in Rotherham from 2012-17 and in this context the
role and functions of the State”. JUST Yorkshire received no response from Champion. Instead
there were more attacks from the media and those involved with JUST Yorkshire
have had vicious threats - including death threats - from the far right with their
names and photographs posted in far right videos.

The title of a Daily Mail article
by Yasmin Alibhai Brown on 29 July this year symbolises the
attempts to shut down the debate: “If you call Rotherham MP Sarah
Champion racist after she spoke out against British-Pakistani grooming gangs
then you are complicit in the attack on young girls”. This underlines the silencing of the community, both male and female, and particularly of Muslim voices, on this issue.

As Shakoor Adalat says: “We are being asked to forget that
children are being sexually abused in a wide range of institutions - Churches,
public schools , the BBC, the Football Association. One in four people across
the country have been abused as children - so CSE is far bigger than Rotherham,
it is endemic... The girls in Rotherham
were poor and vulnerable children. The state is reluctant to provide resources
to help them. Islamophobia is just a smokescreen to hide the lack of investment
which would change their situation.”

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